DETROIT — The Detroit Red Wings could not have picked a worse time to lay an egg on home ice.

And they did it fittingly on Easter Sunday.

The Chicago Blackhawks got two goals each from Brandon Saad and Dave Bolland and a 33-save performance from Corey Crawford as they embarrassed the Wings, 7-1, at Joe Louis Arena.

“We didn’t play hockey tonight whatsoever,” defenseman Niklas Kronwall said. “It’s tough when you spot them a few goals right away from the start. You dig a big hole for yourselves and we couldn’t find a way to get back. It was embarrassing at times.”

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It’s the Wings worst this season on home ice. They were handed a 6-0 setback in St. Louis in the season opener.

“Ugly’s an understatement,” Wings coach Mike Babcock said. “Preparation and work ethic are two things you need to be successful in any walk of life and we weren’t prepared and we didn’t compete at a high enough level. Any way you look at it, they capitalized on our poor effort.

“Did I see it coming? No,” Babcock added. “Is there any excuse for it? No. But obviously as a coaching staff, as a group of players we weren’t ready to go today and you know, it’s flat-out not acceptable.”

Jeremy Morin, Jonathan Toews and Nick Leddy also scored for the Blackhawks, who won for just the second time in their last five games.

And Sunday’s performance comes just after the Wings seemed to have turned things around on the road, going 5-1-0 in their last six.

“I’ll always cautious when we come back from the road,” said Babcock, whose team has lost two games in a row. “To me you have no excuses this time of year, none whatsoever. There’s no reason. There’s just no reason for it at all. I mean, it was painful to watch. There were 57 minutes of pain, that’s the way I looked at it, and they were better than us.”

Jimmy Howard made just 10 saves before being pulled by Jonas Gustavsson, who stopped just nine of the 12 he faced. Corey Emmerton ended Crawford’s bid for this third shutout of the season scoring with 33 seconds left in regulation.

This game was nothing like the first two meetings of the season between the longtime foes that the Blackhawks won both by identical 2-1 scores in overtime.

“I wish I had an answer to that,” Kronwall said when asked about the team’s inconsistent play. “There are way too many ups and downs. We played Chicago twice before this, thought we played some good hockey, but tonight for some reason it wasn’t a good game at all for us.”

The Blackhawks were all over the Wings the first four minutes and 12 seconds of the game and it results in three goals.

Morin got things going, getting in front of Kronwall to shove home a loose puck in the crease for an unassisted goal.

That was followed 48 seconds later when Saad took advantage of some poor defensive zone coverage by Detroit. With all five Wings caught on one side of the ice, Saad took a pass from Michael Frolik to go in alone on Howard to net Chicago’s second goal of the game.

The last goal in the first period came 51 seconds later when Wings defenseman Jakub Kindl tried to clear the puck over the goal and instead backhanded a shot top shelf into the goal to put Chicago up 3-0. The unassisted goal was credited to Bolland, who touched the puck last.

“It just went in our net every time they shot it,” Babcock said. “I don’t even know how many defensive mistakes there were, just clean shots going in, and so the bottom line is the whole thing, I can break it all down to you, but it doesn’t matter. Our effort wasn’t good enough. You can’t win with efforts like that.”

Chicago added two more goals in a span of eight seconds just four minutes into the second period.

Toews got the first, one-timing home a pass from Saad to chase Howard from between the pipes.

Eight seconds later, Saad made it 5-0 Wings after beating Brian Lashoff to a dump in and getting the blade of his stick on the puck to beat Jonas Gustavsson on the first shot he faced.

“When we changed Howie then they shot it in that very same shift, so the bottom line is whatever we did today was poor,” Babcock said. “And it doesn’t reflect well on us at all as far as our preparation goes. So we have a game tomorrow.”

Chicago ended the onslaught with two more in the third. After Bolland made it 6-0 with his second of the game, Leddy went the full length of the ice to beat Gustavsson just inside the post.

“There are no excuses whatsoever,” Kronwall said. “We have to find a way to be a lot better than that. It was embarrassing at times out that, our efforts. It’s tough to start playing when it’s 5-0 already. You can’t do that against any team in the league.”

Send comments to chuck.pleiness@macombdaily.com and visit his blog at redwingsfront.wordpress.com